Parallel Parking and Disparate Impact

A recent study showed that IQ and similar tests were highly useful at predicting who would make it through a year-long truck driving training course. In comments, though, several of my readers (who tend not to be deficient in IQ) pointed to their own troubles during their abortive truck driving careers, which usually involved backing a big rig up.

Backing up can be a tricky cognitive problem. I suspect (on no particular evidence) that being good at backing up is not hugely related to g, the general factor in intelligence. So, a specific test of backing up skill could be useful. Backing up a trailer is harder than backing up car, but for applicants to truck driver training programs, a parallel parking test using the applicant's own vehicle might make a good first cut (along with paper and pencil tests). If somebody is bad at parallel parking his or her own vehicle, that might indicate something about the likelihood that they'll wash out of trucking school.

Parallel parking isn't easy, even for professional heavy equipment drivers. From the June 2005 issue of Concrete Producer trade magazine:

Back for its third year at World of Concrete, the John Deere Load America competition has become a popular mainstay outside the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Participants were more eager than ever to hop inside the cab of a John Deere 544J front-end loader and take on a formidable obstacle course for some terrific prizes. Participants received points for successfully executing a variety of maneuvers such as backing up, parallel parking, and driving up a ramp to drop a ball into a barrel.

Of all the obstacles, parallel parking usually give participants the biggest challenge ...

As a society, we don't benefit when people wash out of expensive training programs for predictable reasons.

So, why wouldn't a trucking firm at least consider a parallel parking test for job applicants?

Well, how about "disparate impact?" What if a legally protected demographic group such as, say, women turned out to pass the parallel parking test at less than four-fifths rate of the highest scoring demographic group?

I have no idea who tend to be the best and worst parallel parkers, but I wouldn't be surprised if women are below average at it. A key part of parallel parking is psychological rather than cognitive: it's the feeling that you damn well deserve to block traffic while you take your time so you can do it right the first time. (I'm reminded of something a PGA rival said about why Arnold Palmer sank so many crucial 20 foot putts: That Arnold had more confidence barely begins to describe the gap between him and the lesser mortals on the golf tour. The key was that Arnold just felt he deserved to sink 20 foot putts.)

And big rig drivers face much harder parking challenges. There's a reason that truck drivers in popular culture are stereotyped as insensitive: sensitive types who worry about how they are blocking other drivers while they try to backup through a three-point reverse turn into an alley 18" wider than their trailer tend to get flustered and mess up.

In a sane, effectual society, questions of disparate impact would be answered once and then we'd move on. We'd check to see if, say, parallel parking was a valid test that provided useful information about who is likely to become a good truck driver. If the parallel parking test had a disparate impact on women, we'd check to see if the unlikely might be true and the test had something odd about it that made it less valid for women. But, once it turned out that, yes, women tend to make lousier truck drivers and, yes, this test merely reveals that, we'd move on.

And yet the Ricci fireman promotion test case shows that when it comes to disparate impact, we don't move on. Fireman promotion tests have been studied and litigated longer than many of you reading this have been alive. Nothing ever changes. But we're all supposed to act like it could change at any minute. That provides a lot of money to discrimination lawyers (e.g., Barack Obama), testing firms, consulting firms that pick the testing firms, etc. etc.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rick Perlstein almost figured out the Mortgage Meltdown in 2007

Mike at RortyBomb just pointed out to me an insightful four-part series from way back in July 2007 called "The Foreclosing of America" by liberal journalist Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, which is all about evil Republican racists. Perlstein's theme was how the Bush Push for the "Ownership Society" led to the Housing Bubble:

What with all the best-dressed Republican strategists speaking of homeownership for one and all as the royal road to permanent Republican rule, what with Bushies constantly boasting of increasing a homeownership rate of 65 percent in 1996 to 69 percent in 2002 - well, might some order for all these regulators to stand down come directly from the White House?

That's a question above my pay grade. It's the kind of question only historians are able to answer decade later, sifting through memoranda in presidential libraries (which is why this White House kneecapped the Presidential Records Act that puts such memos in the public domain; lawyers call this "mens rea").

What we do know now is that that the positive policies the Bush White House has actually put forward to realize greater homeownership bear no relationship whatsoever to the importance, politically and policy-wise, the White House claims to place on the problem. For all intents and purposes, it's been but a single program - the American Dream Down-payment Fund, funded at a paltry $200 million. Let's do a little math. There are, by last count, 73.4 million homeowners. Rough-and-ready, without adjusting for population increase, a homeownership rate of 67.4 percent in 2000 and 68.9 percent in 2005 - and stat-heads, correct me if I'm wrong - we're talking about approximately 1.1 million new homeowners. That's a one-hundred-eight-one buck subsidy for new homeowner. I have to imagine, if Karl Rove was relying on more homeowners to help mint more Republicans, he'd be making some greater effort above and beyond this?

Was Karl Rove relying on all those NINJA loans instead? Was the White House, sub rosa, encouraging them? It's not hard to imagine. If so, how well and truly rogered the Republicans finds themselves. One more Bushian house of cards has collapsed. If only the damage could be contained within the political fortunes of the Republican Party.

I wish I had read Perlstein's series earlier. Despite his insightfulness, Perlstein got zero traction with this line of argument.

One obvious problem was that he didn't present any direct evidence of Bush sending secret signals.

And yet, Perlstein didn't need to speculate about secret signals from the White House to federal regulators about backing off on enforcing credit standards and to mortgage lenders to Go For It. Instead, Bush's messages were sent in the form of Presidential Addresses.

Heck, Bush had an official mural painted to get his message across, presumably so that his point wouldn't be missed by even potential minority subprime borrowers who happened to be illiterate.

So, why didn't Perlstein simply quote Bush's speech from the October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership in which Bush said down payment requirements were the chief barrier to adding 5.5 million minority homeowners to eradicate the racial gap in access to the American Dream?

Now you can see just how powerful was the juju that Bush and Rove were wielding. Here's Rick Perlstein, as fine a hater as you can want, and yet it's more important to him and his readers to denounce Republicans as racists than to denounce Republicans effectively. If Perlstein had tried to quote Bush's speech on "Increasing Minority Homeownership," his head would have exploded.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Three Victorian Questions" by Geoffrey Miller

Here's a 2001 Edge.com essay by Geoffrey Miller, author of the upcoming Spent, answering literary agent John Brockman's question: "What questions have disappeared, and why?"

"Three Victorian questions about potential sexual partners: 'Are they from a good family?'; 'What are their accomplishments?'; 'Was their money and status acquired ethically?' "

To our "Sex and the City" generation, these three questions sound shamefully Victorian and bourgeois. Yet they were not unique to 19th century England: they obsessed the families of eligible young men and women in every agricultural and industrial civilization. Only with our socially-atomized, late-capitalist society have these questions become tasteless, if not taboo. Worried parents ask them only in the privacy of their own consciences, in the sleepless nights before a son or daughter's ill-considered marriage.

The "good family" question always concerned genetic inheritance as much as financial inheritance. Since humans evolved in bands of closely-related kin, we probably evolved an intuitive appreciation of the genetics relevant to mate choice ‹ taking into account the heritable strengths and weakness that we could observe in each potential mate's relatives, as well as their own qualities. Recent findings in medical genetics and behavior genetics demonstrate the wisdom of taking a keen interest in such relatives: one can tell a lot about a young person's likely future personality, achievements, beliefs, parenting style, and mental and physical health by observing their parents, siblings, uncles, and aunts. Yet the current American anti-genetic ideology demands that we ignore such cues of genetic quality ‹ God forbid anyone should accuse us of eugenics. Consider the possible reactions a woman might have to hearing that a potential husband was beaten as a child by parents who were alcoholic, aggressive religious fundamentalists. Twin and adoption studies show that alcoholism, aggressiveness, and religiousity are moderately heritable, so such a man is likely to become a rather unpleasant father. Yet our therapy cures-all culture says the woman should offer only non-judgmental sympathy to the man, ignoring the inner warning bells that may be going off about his family and thus his genes. Arguably, our culture alienates women and men from their own genetic intuitions, and thereby puts their children at risk.

The question "What are their accomplishments?" refers not to career success, but to the constellation of hobbies, interests, and skills that would have adorned most educated young people in previous centuries. Things like playing pianos, painting portraits, singing hymns, riding horses, and planning dinner parties. Such accomplishments have been lost through time pressures, squeezed out between the hyper-competitive domain of school and work, and the narcissistic domain of leisure and entertainment. It is rare to find a young person who does anything in the evening that requires practice (as opposed to study or work) ‹ anything that builds skills and self-esteem, anything that creates a satisfying, productive "flow" state, anything that can be displayed with pride in public. Parental hot-housing of young children is not the same: after the child's resentment builds throughout the French and ballet lessons, the budding skills are abandoned with the rebelliousness of puberty ‹ or continued perfunctorily only because they will look good on college applications. The result is a cohort of young people whose only possible source of self-esteem is the school/work domain ‹ an increasingly winner-take-all contest where only the brightest and most motivated feel good about themselves. (And we wonder why suicidal depression among adolescents has doubled in one generation.) This situation is convenient for corporate recruiting ‹ it channels human instincts for self-display and status into an extremely narrow range of economically productive activities. Yet it denies young people the breadth of skills that would make their own lives more fulfilling, and their potential lovers more impressed. Their identities grow one-dimensionally, shooting straight up towards career success without branching out into the variegated skill sets which could soak up the sunlight of respect from flirtations and friendships, and which could offer shelter, and alternative directions for growth, should the central shoot snap.

The question "Was their money and status acquired ethically?" sounds even quainter, but its loss is even more insidious. As the maximization of share-holder value guides every decision in contemporary business, individual moral principles are exiled to the leisure realm. They can be manifest only in the Greenpeace membership that reduces one's guilt about working for Starbucks or Nike. Just as hip young consumers justify the purchase of immorally manufactured products as "ironic" consumption, they justify working for immoral businesses as "ironic" careerism. They aren't "really" working in an ad agency that handles the Phillip Morris account for China; they're just interning for the experience, or they're really an aspiring screen-writer or dot-com entrepreneur. The explosion in part-time, underpaid, high-turnover service industry jobs encourages this sort of amoral, ironic detachment on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder. At the upper end, most executives assume that shareholder value trumps their own personal values. And in the middle, managers dare not raise issues of corporate ethics for fear of being down-sized. The dating scene is complicit in this corporate amorality. The idea that Carrie Bradshaw or Ally McBeal would stop seeing a guy just because he works for an unethical company doesn't even compute. The only relevant morality is personal ‹ whether he is kind, honest, and faithful to them. Who cares about the effect his company is having on the Phillipino girls working for his sub-contractors? "Sisterhood" is so Seventies. Conversely, men who question the ethics of a woman's career choice risk sounding sexist: how dare he ask her to handicap herself with a conscience, when her gender is already enough of a handicap in getting past the glass ceiling?

In place of these biologically, psychologically, ethically grounded questions, marketers encourage young people to ask questions only about each other's branded identities. Armani or J. Crew clothes? Stanford or U.C.L.A. degree? Democrat or Republican? Prefer "The Matrix" or "You've Got Mail'? Eminem or Sophie B. Hawkins? Been to Ibiza or Cool Britannia? Taking Prozac or Wellbutrin for the depression? Any taste that doesn't lead to a purchase, any skill that doesn't require equipment, any belief that doesn't lead to supporting a non-profit group with an aggressive P.R. department, doesn't make any sense in current mating market. We are supposed to consume our way into an identity, and into our most intimate relationships. But after all the shopping is done, we have to face, for the rest of our lives, the answers that the Victorians sought: what genetic propensities, fulfilling skills, and moral values do our sexual partners have? We might not have bothered to ask, but our children will find out sooner or later.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

UPDATED: Why aren't we paying unemployed illegal immigrants to go home?

From Business Week, here's the latest on places with Depression-level unemployment rates: A couple are in Greater Detroit, but most are in California, and are heavily Hispanic. By the way, in El Centro, the place with the worst unemployment in the country, minorities got 84.3% of all conventional home purchase mortgage dollars in 2006 (prime and subprime) according the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database (see page 2 of this government report). In Merced, the only other place in the country where unemployment is over 20%, minorities got 79.7% of the 2006 mortgage dollars.

Of the top 203 metropolitan statistical areas in Q1-2009, "Merced, Calif., had the second highest [foreclosure] rate, according to RealtyTrac.

So, our bipartisan policy was to lure in illegal immigrants "to do the jobs Americans just won't do" building the houses Americans just don't need and that Hispanics, American or illegal, turned out to just not be able to afford.

Cities With Jobless Rates of 15% or More
Metro Area	State	March 2009 Jobless Rate	Rise From March 2008
El Centro	CA	25.1%	7.5
Merced	CA	20.4%	6.7
Yuba City	CA	19.5%	6.8
Elkhart-Goshen	IN	18.8%	13
Visalia-Porterville	CA	17.7%	6.1
Modesto	CA	17.5%	6.3
Bend	OR	17.0%	9.2
Fresno	CA	17.0%	6
Redding	CA	16.8%	6.6
Hanford-Corcoran	CA	16.7%	5.4
Stockton	CA	16.4%	6.2
Bakersfield	CA	15.9%	5.2
Salinas	CA	15.7%	5
Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton	NC	15.4%	9.1
Flint	MI	15.3%	4.6
Madera-Chowchilla	CA	15.3%	5
Yuma	AZ	15.3%	5.4
Ocean City	NJ	15.0%	4.2

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NYT: NAEP Racial Gaps Haven't Magically Disappeared

From the New York Times:

'No Child' Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap

by Sam Dillon

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

So, everybody is learning more. And this is a problem?

Perhaps the federal government should just hit all the white kids over the head with a ballpeen hammer. That would narrow the gap.

Although Black and Hispanic elementary, middle and high school students all scored much higher on the federal test than they did three decades ago, most of those gains were not made in recent years, but during the desegregation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s.

No, I think most of the black advantage was picked up from ending the Jim Crow system of segregated schools in the South in 1969-1970, which really were bad.

That was well before the 2001 passage of the No Child law, the official description of which is “An Act to Close the Achievement Gap.”

“There’s not much indication that N.C.L.B. is causing the kind of change we were all hoping for,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland. “Trends after the law took effect mimic trends we were seeing before. But in terms of watershed change, that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

The results no doubt will stoke debate about how to rewrite the No Child law when the Obama administration brings it up for reauthorization later this year. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said he would like to strengthen national academic standards, tighten requirements that high-quality teachers be distributed equally across schools in affluent and poor neighborhoods, and make other adjustments. “We still have a lot more work to do,” Mr. Duncan said of the latest scores. But the long-term assessment results could invigorate those who challenge the law’s accountability model itself.

Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of the United States’ 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970s. This was largely due to a shift in demographics; there are now far more lower-scoring minorities in relation to whites. In 1971, the proportion of white 17-year-olds who took the reading test was 87 percent, while minorities were 12 percent. Last year, whites had declined to 59 percent while minorities had increased to 40 percent.

So, how's that massive demographic change working out for us?

The percentage of Hispanic 13-year-olds in the NAEP sample increased from 7% in 1984 to 21% in 2008.

The scores of 9- and 13-year-old students, however, were up modestly in reading, and were considerably higher in math, since 2004, the last time the test was administered. And they were quite a bit higher than those of students of the same age a generation back. Still, the progress of younger students tapered off as they got older.

Some experts said the results proved that the No Child law had failed to make serious headway in lifting academic achievement. “We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”

But Margaret Spellings, Mr. Duncan’s predecessor under President Bush, called the results a vindication of the No Child law.

“It’s not an accident that we’re seeing the most improvement where N.C.L.B. has focused most vigorously,” Ms. Spellings said. “The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight — it’s not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability-type approach.”

Whether anyone knows how to extend the results achieved with younger students through the turbulent high school years remains an open question.

The math and reading test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Long-Term Trends, was given to a nationally representative sample of 26,000 students last year. It was the 12th time since 1971 that the Department of Education administered a comparable test to students ages 9, 13 and 17. The scores, released on Tuesday in Washington, allow for comparisons of student achievement every few years back to the Vietnam and Watergate years.

You can look at the 2008 NAEP scores versus old scores here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Diversity in Action

Here's a New York Times article:

NY Councilman's Role in Sister's Hiring Is Examined

by Ray Rivera and Russ Beuttner

A few years ago, when New York City was pressuring advertising agencies to hire more black executives, City Councilman Larry B. Seabrook, chairman of the Council’s Civil Rights Committee, approached one of the largest companies with a plan to address the issue.

The company, the Omnicom Group, ultimately endorsed Mr. Seabrook’s plan to create a high-powered diversity committee and agreed to spend $2.25 million on initiatives. It also decided to retain a consultant from Atlanta whom Mr. Seabrook had proposed to help run the committee.

The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, praised the plan. H. Carl McCall, a former state comptroller, agreed to serve on the committee. And Omnicom saw the plan as an effective response to concerns that just 2 percent of the higher-ranking jobs at New York advertising firms were held by blacks.

But Ms. Quinn, Mr. McCall and the company say they were never told that the candidate recommended by Mr. Seabrook in early 2007 was his sister.

Omnicom officials said they did not learn of the sibling relationship until they discovered it on their own, shortly before they settled on Mr. Seabrook’s sister, Priscilla A. Jenkins, for the job of coordinating the committee’s work.

Ms. Jenkins was a former college administrator who ran a consulting business out of her home. Company officials said they were not concerned that Mr. Seabrook never mentioned the relationship to them. And the officials would not say what the company pays Ms. Jenkins.

The company decided to retain Ms. Jenkins as the committee’s executive director because of her “extremely impressive résumé,” said Weldon H. Latham, the company’s outside legal counsel on diversity.

“Her experience in management, administration, education, diversity and corporate and community liaison made her an attractive candidate,” added Mr. Latham, who said he could not release her résumé. He said that apart from recommending Ms. Jenkins, Mr. Seabrook played no role in the decision to retain her.

Ms. Quinn referred the matter this month to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board and the Council’s Standards and Ethics Committee after learning of the relationship from a reporter.

City regulations prohibit elected officials from using their positions to obtain financial gain or personal advantage for themselves or close family members. ...

Ms. Jenkins’s duties include administrative, communication and coordination tasks, and she plays a role in setting the committee’s agenda, the company said. In addition to hourly consulting fees commensurate with industry standards, Ms. Jenkins is compensated for her expenses, including travel costs from Atlanta, Mr. Latham said. The committee and its subcommittees have met numerous times and “have been instrumental in helping shape and enhance Omnicom and its agencies’ diversity efforts,” he said.

When Mr. Seabrook came up with his plan to address diversity, the city’s Commission on Human Rights, a mayoral agency, was just finishing a two-year investigation of hiring practices in the advertising industry.

The commission had investigated 16 of the city’s largest agencies and was threatening to hold potentially embarrassing hearings if the companies did not sign pacts agreeing to set hiring goals and to report on their progress annually. Patricia L. Gatling, the agency’s commissioner, said she had not been aware that Mr. Seabrook was working with Omnicom on a separate plan.

Most of the companies signed agreements with the commission. But four agencies affiliated with Omnicom objected to numeric hiring goals and instead pursued the proposal by Mr. Seabrook, who was also planning hearings.

As a result of its discussions with Mr. Seabrook, the firm agreed to provide $1.25 million to the eight-member committee over five years to finance programs on diversity and to devote an additional $1 million to establish a marketing and communications curriculum at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Omnicom’s plan with Mr. Seabrook did not satisfy the Human Rights Commission, however, and two weeks later, the company signed the pact with the commission.

In the most recent numbers released by the city, the advertising industry reported that it was largely meeting the hiring targets that it had agreed to with the commission. In 2008, for example, 30 percent of those hired into upper-echelon positions were minorities, according to the industry numbers.

Before assuming her role with Omnicom, Ms. Jenkins, 55, directed the Center for Academic Excellence and Leadership at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. She worked at the small historically black college for 15 years, until 2003. Many staff members left the college after it lost its accreditation in 2002. The program she had managed was designed to offer remedial assistance and to help students find internships, and she oversaw a staff of two to four people, according to Milford W. Greene, a former professor and a former assistant dean at Morris Brown. ...

According to city records, Ms. Jenkins has also done consulting work for at least three Bronx-based nonprofit groups financed by Mr. Seabrook through City Council discretionary funds.

The groups, the Mercy Foundation, the Northeast Bronx Redevelopment Corporation and the African-American Legal and Civic Hall of Fame, were run at the time by Gloria Jones-Grant, a close associate of Mr. Seabrook’s. The groups are among those that investigators are scrutinizing as part of an investigation that began last year into how the Council spends its discretionary funds.

Since Mr. Seabrook joined the Council in 2002, the groups have secured more than $1 million in city contracts, mostly through Mr. Seabrook.

The Mercy Foundation, which paid Ms. Jenkins $7,500 in 2007 to help with what city records describe as an immigration seminar, has received nearly $200,000 in grants from the Council. It is unclear how much Ms. Jenkins has been paid by the groups in total because the city would not release additional documents, citing the continuing investigation.

In the mid-1990s, when Mr. Seabrook was a state legislator, federal investigators looked into his role in financing the Northeast Bronx Redevelopment Corporation and how the money was spent. The investigation did not produce any criminal charges, but a state audit later criticized how the group had spent $260,000 it had received, saying that it should return $46,000 because it had not adequately documented the expenses.

In approaching Omnicom, Mr. Seabrook envisioned an industrywide committee, with a full-time executive director, that would work with the Council and use a combination of public and private money, Mr. Latham said. Later, Mr. Seabrook gave the company a list of recommendations for committee members and one name for executive director, Ms. Jenkins’s, Mr. Latham said.

As discussions continued, he said, Omnicom realized that it would be the only source of financing and that this would be, essentially, its committee. Omnicom made the executive director position part time, Mr. Latham said, and discovered that Ms. Jenkins was Mr. Seabrook’s sister. He said the company never brought it up with Mr. Seabrook.

Mr. McCall, the Omnicom committee’s chairman, said of Ms. Jenkins: “The fact is she had a job and she did the job. I don’t know how she got the job.”

Why is this sort of a scandal, but the First Lady having the equivalent make-work diversity racket job at the U of Chicago Hospitals, and getting paid $117k when her husband was chairman of the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services Committee and then getting her salary more than doubled when her husband got elected to the U.S. Senate, not a scandal?

The best answer I can come up with is that Civil Service laws are supposed to prevent favoritism in government hiring. Still, private interests, like the U of C hospitals, really aren't supposed to bribe elected officials by hiring their loved ones to make work jobs and then giving the loved ones huge raises when the elected official gets elected to a higher office. (The existence of the Diversity Racket makes all this easier because it's obviously unimportant whether they accomplish anything. The less they accomplish in, say, getting no-bid contracts for minority firms, the better for the general public). Maybe it's not illegal, but isn't it a little unseemly? Especially since Mr. Obama carefully positioned Mrs. Obama as this home-and-children-first Earth Mother during the campaign, so how in the world can she be said to have "earned" $317k in the year after his election to the Senate?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Mrs. Stephen Jay Gould sponsors lawsuit against Jared Diamond

Last year, Jared Diamond published a long account in The New Yorker of stories his driver in New Guinea had told him about a bloody feud he'd led in the New Guinea highlands. (I commented on it here.) Now, the driver and another man are suing Diamond for $10 million, saying the story isn't true.

From Chronicles of Higher Education:

“While acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged,” wrote Jared M. Diamond in an essay in The New Yorker last April.

Now two of the subjects of that essay are acknowledging their own vengeful feelings. This week a lawyer filed a $10-million defamation claim in a New York court on behalf of two Papua New Guinea men whom Mr. Diamond described as active participants in clan warfare during the 1990s.

Mr. Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of the best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton, 1997), and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2004), based the essay almost entirely on accounts given to him by Hup Daniel Wemp, an oil-field technician who served as Mr. Diamond’s driver during a 2001-2 visit to New Guinea. (The full text of the essay is open only to New Yorker subscribers, but a long summary is available here.

Mr. Wemp is now one of the lawsuit’s two plaintiffs; the other is Henep Isum Mandingo, a man who, according to Mr. Diamond’s article, was attacked and paralyzed on orders from Mr. Wemp.

For nearly a year, Mr. Diamond’s article has been scrutinized by Rhonda Roland Shearer, director of the Art Science Research Laboratory, a multifaceted New York organization with a sideline in media criticism. Ms. Shearer, a sculptor and writer, is the widow of Stephen Jay Gould, who preceded Mr. Diamond as a widely esteemed public interpreter of science.

Gould's widow sure likes lawsuits. A few years ago she filed suit for malpractice against the doctor who had saved Gould's life from cancer in 1982.

The Stinky Journalism website run by her Art Science Research Laboratory says:

Art Science Research Laboratory (ASRL) is a not-for-profit, 501(3)c, founded by Stephen Jay Gould, and Rhonda Roland Shearer in 1996.

The notion of Stephen Jay Gould founding a website to combat "stinky journalism" is hilarious. This is a writer whose biggest bestseller, The Mismeasure of Man, remains the epitome of stinky journalism. High class stinky journalism is what made Mr. and Mrs. Gould rich. As the AP reported on Mrs. Gould's lawsuit against her late husband's doctor:

"The lawsuit does not specify the damages being sought, but says that Dr. Gould earned $300,000 a year from speaking engagements alone, that "a seven-figure income was his norm" and that when he died he was about to enter into a book contract for more than $2 million."

Here's Stinky Journalism's endless, poorly organized, poorly edited, and minor error-filled diatribe against Diamond.

This lawsuit against Diamond is also part of the cultural anthropology profession's war against Diamond (which I discussed in 2007), who has become a best-selling author by mixing the human sciences with Darwinism (while clinging hard enough to political correctness to stay in the money). Although Diamond has made a fortune by coming up with politically correct rationalizations for the obvious huge gaps in achievement among the races, to cultural anthropologists, he's not politically correct enough.

Forbes reports:

Complicating Wemp's case, perhaps, is an interview he gave to Shearer's researchers, in which he stated that the stories he told Diamond were in fact true.

But a Wemp friend and legal adviser, Mako John Kuwimb, explains: "When foreigners come to our culture, we tell stories as entertainment. Daniel's stories were not serious narrative, and Daniel had no idea he was being interviewed for publication."

Pacific Islanders are notorious for yanking the chains of visiting Western academics -- just look at how Samoan girls snookered Margaret Mead in the 1920s. Moreover, guys like to tell stories about how tough they are, so when your driver tells you about how many men he's killed protecting his family's honor, you shouldn't necessarily take him all that seriously.

So, I have no idea if this story is true or not. Diamond's article was, literally, a story about a bunch of savages slaughtering each other in the jungle. That's the kind of thing that doesn't leave much of a paper trail.

I imagine Wemp would be happy to settle out of court for $100,000 or whatever, which is serious cash in PNG. Wemp's lawsuit is ridiculous because obviously Diamond didn't just make up the story. He heard it from Wemp, the plaintiff. The story Wemp told may or may not be true. If it's not, the other parties named in it may have some kind of case against Diamond for negligence in credulously believing a blowhard's tall tales. But Wemp doesn't have a leg to stand on.

But all this raises once again the question that comes up practically every time The New Yorker prints a Malcolm Gladwell article, such as the one libeling Charles Murray that led to a shaming retraction from Gladwell's editor David Remnick: Whatever happened to The New Yorker's famous Bright Lights, Big City-style factcheckers? Or have I answered my own question?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What Obama hasn't figured out yet: "Better Teachers" mean "_____er Teachers"

These days, everybody is in favor of having Better Teachers in our public schools: Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, the whole gang. Everybody is in favor of hiring Better Teachers and easing out Worse Teachers.

Heck, I'm in favor of Better Teachers.

But guess what Obama et al haven't figured out yet about Better Teachers? It's something that James S. Coleman discovered in working on his 1966 Coleman Report.

I'm reading Race and Education: 1954-2007 by U. of Delaware historian Raymond Wolters. It's an academic study that's well-written enough to appeal to a mass audience. It's unusual in that it covers both the well-trodden ground of Supreme Court decisions about race and public schools, from Brown v. Board of Education onward, while at the same time recounting exactly the unintended consequences of what those august deliberations did to real children in the classrooms and hallways and lavatories.

A major figure in the book is quantitative sociologist James S. Coleman, who was given $1 million by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to study how much blacks were shortchanged by the public schools. But his 1966 Coleman report proved disappointing to LBJ Administration. Wolters writes:

The achievement gap troubled Coleman. As a sociologist he was inclined to ascribe the differences in black and white test scores to the influence of the social environment, and he also knew that attributing even part of the difference to racial inheritance would place him outside the pale of his profession and render him ineligible for future grants. For Coleman and for many other educators and sociologist who studied his report, the key variables were family background and neighborhood. There was no correlation between test scores and per-pupil spending, age of textbooks, and a host of other measures. But there was a correlation with family background, the education and occupations of parents, and the number of books in the home. ...

For Coleman, these findings were unwelcome. Personally, he favored more spending for education. And Coleman's dismay was compounded by another correlation that emerged from the data. Both black and white children seemed to do better on tests if their teachers had done well on a standard test of vocabulary. This was especially problematical because black teachers were "on the whole less well prepared, less qualified, with lower verbal skills, than their white counterparts." This led to "the conjecture that [students] would do less well on average under black teachers than under white teachers." If so, "a major source of inequality of educational opportunity for black students was the fact they were being taught by black teachers." Yet this possibility was so heterodox that the Coleman report did not pursue the matter. In 1991 Coleman expressed regret over the decision "not to ask the crucial question." "A dispassionate researcher," he wrote, "would have gone on to ask the question we did not ask." ...

Poring over the statistics, he noted that African American teachers, on average, had slightly more years of formal education than their white counterparts. But the black teachers lagged behind whites in vocabulary and reading comprehension.

In other words, what Obama hasn't figured out yet, although James S. Coleman figured it out back in 1966, is that Better Teachers means Whiter Teachers.

When it finally dawns on Obama that if we actually start firing worse teachers and hiring better teachers, we'll be, on net, firing blacks and hiring whites, you can expect this whole effort to get buried so far under affirmative action that nothing good comes of it.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Who benefits from "cap & trade?"

I know the answer to that question about who benefits from Obama's global warming-fighting strategy is supposed to be "Gaia," but don't their have to be individual winners and losers? Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I'm guessing that losers will tend to include suburbanite and rural vehicle owners, while winners will include urban rapid transit users. And, I'm guessing, that that's just fine with Obama.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Truck driving and cognitive skills

Years ago, a reader who owned a trucking firm asked me if IQ testing could help his firm pick truck drivers who wouldn't quit on them, wouldn't get lost, and wouldn't get into costly accidents. The U.S. military often assigns low scorers on the AFQT to truck driving duties, but, keep in mind, virtually the lowest scorers allowed to enlist from 1992 thru 2004 were 92 IQs, who aren't stupid by any means. Truck driving involves a fair degree of cognitive demands, but not as much as, say, driving a tank, so the military figures it can get away with putting its 2 digit IQs into truck driver spots.

It sounded like an interesting project, but I never got around to it, and have felt guilty about it ever since.

Now there's a paper (found via GNXP.com) on a study of 1066 trainee truckers in the U.S.:

Cognitive Skills Explain Economic Preferences, Strategic Behavior, and Job Attachment, by Stephen V. Burks, Jeffrey P. Carpenter, Lorenz Götte, and Aldo Rustichini

In large firms of the type we study, the American Trucking Associations consistently report that annual turnover rates exceed 100% (21). Most driver trainees, including our subjects, borrow the cost of training from their new employer, a debt which is forgiven after twelve months of post‐training service, but which becomes payable in full upon earlier exit. Yet over half our subjects exit before twelve months, which makes predicting survival of considerable interest.

The social scientists gave the trainee truckers the Ravens non-verbal IQ test, an ETS test of numeracy, and had them play a quantitative game called Hit 15. They also had them engage in the kind of Vernon Smith behavioral economics experiments that help measure future orientation and the like.

Figure 4 displays the survival curves for distinct values of a typical socio‐economic variable (marital status), as well as for each quintile for the Hit 15 Index. The difference between married and un‐married is small, while the difference among the quintiles in any of the cognitive skills scores is large. Marital status is typical of other socio‐economic variables, such as credit score, number of dependents, prior job, and so on: these explain little of the variation in survival. The survival curves are similar for the IQ Index and the Numeracy. The difference between survival levels at different scores is particularly large for the Hit 15 Index: the survival for the top scorers is twice as large as for the bottom ones.

IQ, numeracy, and the Hit 15 game were all correlated with graduation rates from the one-year training program. The Hit 15 game was a particularly good predictor of who would graduate from the training program. Interestingly, the top quintile in numeracy had a worse graduation rate than the next highest quintile. Perhaps the most numerate tended to get alternative employment as bookkeepers, or whatever, jobs where you get to go home every evening.

Their abstract:

Economic analysis has said little about how an individual’s cognitive skills (CS's) are related to the individual’s preferences in different choice domains, such as risk-taking or saving, and how preferences in different domains are related to each other. Using a sample of 1,000 trainee truckers we report three findings. First, we show a strong and significant relationship between an individual’s cognitive skills and preferences, and between the preferences in different choice domains. The latter relationship may be counterintuitive: a patient individual, more inclined to save, is also more willing to take calculated risks. A second finding is that measures of cognitive skill predict social awareness and choices in a sequential Prisoner's Dilemma game. Subjects with higher CS's more accurately forecast others' behavior, and differentiate their behavior depending on the first mover’s choice, returning higher amount for a higher transfer, and lower for a lower one. After controlling for investment motives, subjects with higher CS’s also cooperate more as first movers. A third finding concerns on-the-job choices. Our subjects incur a significant financial debt for their training that is forgiven only after twelve months of service. Yet over half leave within the first year, and cognitive skills are also strong predictors of who exits too early, stronger than any other social, economic and personality measure in our data. These results suggest that cognitive skills affect the economic lives of individuals, by systematically changing preferences and choices in a way that favors the economic success of individuals with higher cognitive skills.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Greenspan to testify on immigration

L. Gordon Crovitz writes on the WSJ op-ed page:

We Need an Immigration Stimulus

... Which brings us to our own era, and the debate on immigration reform beginning this week with congressional hearings that include an appearance by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. President Barack Obama says he wants to address the issue by the end of the year.

So begins the media rehabilitation of Alan Greenspan: Sure, he helped cause the housing bubble and the mortgage meltdown, but now he's making it up for it by coming out on the side of truth and justice by being for immigration. He's an ideologue screw-up on everything else, but at least he's right about immigration.

How much you wanna bet that nobody at the hearing will ask him about the link between immigration and the mortgage meltdown? What link? Whoever heard of such a thing?

We've all been brainwashed so many time over the last 1 to 2 generations about how Diversity Is Our Strength that it was only natural for the Smart Money to see the flood of Diverse Immigrants into California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida as a sure thing investment. The supply of land is fixed, but the demand for land in the Sand States keeps going up due to Hispanic immigration, so houses there must rise in price forever.

It usually pays to be skeptical about immigration reform, given the alliance between nativists and labor unions for tighter borders. Still, an economic downturn is the right time to move on immigration, one of the few policy tools that could clearly boost growth.

The pace of lower-skilled migration has slowed due to higher unemployment. This could make it less contentious to ease the path to legalization for the 12 million undocumented workers and their families in the U.S.

The Open Boarders crowd isn't even trying to make sense these days, are they? They just intend to muscle this thing through, babbling whatever nonsense it takes.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Supreme Court Justices and Ricci

From my new VDARE.com column:

Last week, the Ricci reverse discrimination case came up before the Supreme Court for oral questioning. A lawyer representing the New Haven firemen—who are suing the city for refusing to promote them for the last half decade because zero blacks passed the 2003 promotional exams—was grilled by the liberal justices. The Obama Administration’s representative, Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler , and a lawyer representing the city were roasted by the conservative justices.

New Haven’s attorney claimed that the city had strong evidence for discarding the test as invalid after finding out the results by race. But Justice Samuel Alito pointed out the preposterousness of that claim in a scalding rhetorical question:

"[The city] chose the company that framed the test, and then as soon as it saw the results, it decided it wasn't going to go forward with the promotions. The company offered to validate the test. The City refused to pay for that, even though that was part of its contract with the company. And all it has is this testimony by a competitor, Mr. Hornick, who said—who hadn't seen the test, and he said, I could do a better test—you should make the promotions based on this, but I could give you—I could draw up a better test, and by the way, here's my business card if you want to hire me in the future.

“How's that a strong basis in the evidence?"

Nor was Chief Justice John Roberts impressed by New Haven’s claim that they had to junk the completed test results because of the danger of being sued for discrimination against blacks under the “disparate impact” interpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. (Which is now, apparently, more important than the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment). He said:

"CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: It seems to me an odd argument to say that you can violate the Constitution because you have to comply with the statute."

Deputy Solicitor General Ed Kneedler barely got a chance to open his mouth before Roberts scoffed at the Obama Administration’s sincerity on race:

"MR. KNEEDLER: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: This Court has long recognized that Title VII prohibits not only intentional discrimination but acts that are discriminatory in their operation.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: With respect to both blacks and whites, correct?

MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So, can you assure me that the government's position would be the same if this test—black applicants—firefighters scored highest on this test in disproportionate numbers, and the City said we don't like that result, we think there should be more whites on the fire department, and so we're going to throw the test out? The government of United States would adopt the same position?"

The last thing Obama wants is for the Supreme Court to issue a landmark, precedent-setting decision in the Ricci case. The public finds the courageous fireman plaintiffs to be sympathetic and the justice of their complaint to be commonsensical. Quotas could easily be scuppered based on this case.

Accordingly, the Administration is calling for the case to be remanded all the way back to a jury trial over whether the city acted with racial malice—i.e., Obama wants Ricci to go away, far away.

In reality, however, Ricci is not an unusual case with particularly complicated facts. It’s just business as usual in American society.

When President Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, he chose, out of hundreds of job offers, to work for a Chicago law firm that specialized in suing over purported discrimination against blacks. For example, as I point out in America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance,” Obama made one of his rare court appearances to accuse Citibank of not giving enough mortgage money to minorities. The Chicago Sun-Times reported in 2007:

"Obama represented Calvin Roberson in a 1994 lawsuit against Citibank, charging the bank systematically denied mortgages to African-American applicants and others from minority neighborhoods." [As Lawyer Obama Was Strong, Silent Type December 17, 2007 By Abdon M. Pallasch]

(By the way, how’s that working out for us these days?)

More

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Swine flu

I haven't been following the deaths of people in Mexico (and in the U.S., primarily in the Southwest) closely, but Tyler Cowen says:

Some people are puzzled as to how human, pig, and bird strains of the flu have mixed together, but if you have spent any time in rural Mexico the answer is obvious: these creatures all live together in close quarters.

What worries me, personally, is that many of their cousins keep chickens in their backyards here in the densely populated San Fernando Valley. I don't know how many keep pigs, but I wouldn't be surprised.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"State of Play"

From my review in The American Conservative:

To chase down the conspiracy, Russell Crowe’s veteran reporter teams up with a callow blogger (the ever-perky Rachel McAdams of “Wedding Crashers”). Much banter about the rivalry between print and online journalism ensues. Yet the movie misses the key personality difference between traditional media and the more Aspergery culture of the Web: newspaper reporters converse constantly, while Web people prefer Google to human contact. Young Matthew Yglesias, for instance, recently declared on his blog, “Definitely the whole time I was employed at The Atlantic I never once returned a voicemail. … In general, I’m not a fan of talking on the phone ...”

The movie portrays Crowe’s aging reporter as a solitary man, trudging alone to confront the powerful in their lairs. In reality, as Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop made clear, traditional reporters are most comfortable in packs, where they can gauge what’s “appropriate” to ask and to write from the consensus of their colleagues.

Just when the strident soundtrack (synthesizers and militaristic drums relentlessly barking “Tense up!”) and now-mandatory Shaky-Cam cinematography have almost ruined a decent if predictable story, an amusingly florid Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) shows up as a hedonistic public relations consultant, seemingly to contrast the greed of the flack with the nobility of the crusading journalist. The film’s countless screenwriters, though, are aware that reporters, such as the New York Times’ Judith Miller, who pipelined so much pro-Iraq war propaganda, are often just more respectable PR agents, publicizing messages in return for access to newsmakers.

From there, the movie keeps departing from its earlier Vast Corporate Conspiracy rut, ending with a plot twist that, while contrived, is surprisingly realistic.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Movie statistics?

Over time, sports statistics hobbyists have become professional analysts employed by sports teams. Bill James started out analyzing baseball statistics in the 1970s as a boilerroom attendant and now he has a very nice job with the Boston Red Sox. The less mature field of basketball statistics has been losing its leading hobbyists over the last few years to NBA front offices.

With basketball statistics, it's been kind of like the early 1940s when the physics journals that had been full in the late 1930s of of exciting atomic discoveries suddenly had a shortage of new papers from Americans and Brits about splitting the atom. The Germans eventually realized that there was a very big reason for this sudden silence.

One of the main trends in baseball and basketball statistics has been away from analyzing existing box-score statistics to making up new statistics by analyzing video. For example, baseball statisticians have now been reviewing games to see which section of the field balls were hit too.

But let's think about other ways that quantitatively-inclined males can waste time.

For example, are there any movie statistics besides box office totals? The only use of movie statistics I can recall involved the lawsuit against Oliver Stone that was aided by legal novelist John Grisham over Stone's movie "Natural Born Killers," a vile film about a couple who conduct thrill kill murders of random people. A friend of Grisham's was randomly murdered by a couple who had just watched "Natural Born Killers" a whole bunch of times in a row while taking drugs.

"NBK" was made, right after "JFK", near the height of Stone's considerable powers of cinematic razzle-dazzle. To establish the amount of effort put into making "NBK" psychologically powerful, the plaintiff's lawyers counted up the extraordinary number of cuts in the film and compared it to an ordinary film.

So, number of cuts per minute would be an interesting statistic. Which directors or editors use the most, which use the fewest. Is there a sweet spot? Does it change over time for a director? Stone's "W." from last year has many fewer than "NBK."

That's just one thought, but you might have more.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Last go-round at Talking Points Memo

I've got one last post up at Talking Points Memo Cafe, on how McCain's lack of sophisticated understanding of the Hispanic vote betrayed him. You can follow the discussion here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Equal Credit Opportunity Act

Matthew Yglesias recalls how, even last October, it was still ridiculously easy in terms of documentation for him to get a mortgage. A reader named Matt R. comments:

I understand your thinking, but what I don’t think you realize is that the type of judgments and research which you think might make sense for mortgage underwriting have been severely inhibited by the financial regulators. ECOA (equal credit opportunity act) and concerns about so called red-lining have made the regulators virtually eliminate all credit criteria that can’t be coded into a machine. The main push behind this effort has been due to regulators worry that non-algorithmic decision making is just a mask for rejecting minority and underprivileged applicants. This is especially applicable to any policy which attempts to be forward thinking. For instance, if an underwriter were to put in a policy discouraging loans to folks in the struggling construction industry, the general counsel would immediately reply “show me the precise data that says that there is a historical statistical correlation between construction employment and loan default rates, or else we are going to be accused of implementing a policy of ‘disparately impacting’ Hispanics.” One of the consequences of nervousness regarding “disparate impact” has been the increased use of statistical score models in consumer underwriting. In terms of how business is done, this reduces reliance on a semi-skilled workforce that leverages relationship, intuition, and local environmental factors and opens up new opportunities for technical folks good at mining data, recognizing data relationships, and creating logistic regression models and so forth. And yes, this does encourage centralization of consumer banking and the development of a highly paid and (maybe) skilled technical manager set in underwriting.

The main downfall of this approach which relies on historical data patterns is that it is easy to lose sight of what is really happening to consumer balance sheets and that recent past results may be anomalous. So in the past situation where consumers could roll over debt due to rising home prices and the increased availability of home equity loans, the banks’ models were “tricked” by borrower profiles who were repaying their loans but yet were in unsustainable consumption and borrowing patterns. And because the top underwriting brass are absorbed in their models and far from the realities of the borrowers’ “real” situations–not being able to put the full picture together while sitting across the table from borrowers daily–a realistic picture that might have stimulated a more conservative underwriting approach did not force itself on credit committees until the loans (thus the data) started going bad.

And by the way, you can see clear proof of the regulatory impact of ECOA laws demonstrated by their non-applicability in small business lending. Relationship and judgmental underwriting remain prevalent in small business lending, even for comparable loan sizes being made to consumers.

The last point I’ll make is that the stupid money behind securitization business ruined everything anyway. Try adhering to rigorous underwriting processes and reasonable pricing/underwriting criteria at a bank while finance company next door has agreements to have all of its poorly priced and researched loans purchased the next day no questions asked. The banks are then faced with the decision to either put in an application process and pricing structure which no consumer will actually vie for (thus losing all market share) or following the leader. This is why tough handed regulation is needed to keep the industry in check because all can be led astray too easily. The follow the leader psychology is the source of every financial panic.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Updated: Mancow listeners

I'll probably be on the Mancow national radio show talking about the Ricci Supreme Court case from about 9:35 am to 9:40 am or so on Friday morning. That's Eastern Time, or 6:35 am Pacific Time.

You can read my article on the Supreme Court's firemen case at VDARE.com here.

UPDATED: Well, it didn't happen today. So, the new plan is for me to be on Monday morning at 7:10 am EDT.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The True Believer

In 2002-2004, George W. Bush actively campaigned for zero down and zero doc mortgages in the name of closing the racial gap in minority homeownership. This sent a big signal to the financial industry that federal financial regulators would not be actively enforcing traditional lending standards.

The Housing Bubble took off in 2004, helping Bush get re-elected, with his share of his strategically treasured Hispanic vote up from about 35% in 2000 to 40% in 2004 as Hispanics got more mortgages and more jobs as construction workers and home improvement fixer-uppers.

This is similar to how Richard Nixon had his friend Fed Chairman Arthur Burns inflate the money supply in 1972 so he could get re-elected. The interesting thing, though, is that Bush appears to have been largely uncynical. If the month after his re-election, Bush had signaled to the Executive Branch and to the industry that they shouldn't be quite so lax on mortgage standards any more, there wouldn't have been a mortgage meltdown.

But he wasn't that cynical. He drank his own Kool-Aid.

DataQuick reports on California mortgages:

Of the 3.7 million home loans made in 2004, less than 1 percent have since resulted in a lender filing a default notice. Of the 3.7 million loans originated in 2005, 4.9 percent have triggered a default notice so far. Of the 3 million in 2006, 8.5 percent have so far resulted in default. A particularly toxic period appears to have been August through November 2006 which had more than a 9 percent default rate. Of the 2.1 million loans made in 2007, it's 4.6 percent - a percentage that's likely to rise significantly during the rest of this year.

You'll notice that the default percentages should run in the opposite direction: "Of cars built in 2004, 8.5% are no longer running, while of cars built in 2005, 4.9% have been disposed of, but less than one percent of 2006 cars are now out of action." That makes sense. Instead, "scraping the bottom of the barrel" is the best single explanation of the 2004 to 2006 trend.

The people who bought in California in 2004 weren't quite so sterling credit prospects as this makes them look. They bought at lower prices than the classes of 2005 and 2006, and had more chance to get out from under their mortgages by selling while still above water rather than defaulting.

But housing prices in California more or less plateaued in later 2005 through 2006, so the worse performance of 2006 borrowers compared to 2005 reflects, in part, bottom-scraping.

Still, the take-away message is that the class of 2005 included a lot of people who couldn't qualify for a loan in 2004. And the class of the first half of 2006 included people who couldn't qualify for a loan even in 2005. And the class of August-November 2006 included a fair number of people who couldn't normally borrow a cup of sugar from their neighbor.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Me on Mancow

I'll probably be on the Mancow national radio show talking about the Ricci Supreme Court case from about 9:35 am to 9:40 am or so on Friday morning. That's Eastern Time, or 6:35 am Pacific Time.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More on Red State, Blue State

I've put up a couple of more posts at the Talking Points Memo Cafe Book Club (six proper nouns in a row!) on statistical whiz Andrew Gelman's book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. You can see the discussion here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Spent:" This should be better than Malcolm Gladwell's books

Geoffrey Miller, the bright and handsome evolutionary psychologist at the U. of New Mexico, author of The Mating Mind a decade ago, has a new airport book coming out that should give Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Florida, Steve Levitt and the rest a run for their money. The idea of nonfiction books aimed at the frequent flier class that draw upon the human sciences for insights of value to people in business is a good one. Unfortunately, the execution has been mediocre so far. I haven't seen this one yet, but I have hopes for it.

Why do we buy what we buy? Like Freakonomics or The Tipping Point, SPENT: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (Viking; On-sale: May 18, 2009; $26.95), by leading evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, is a bold and revelatory book that illuminates the unseen logic behind the chaos of consumerism and suggests new ways we can become happier consumers and more responsible citizens.

Evolutionary psychology—the compelling science of human nature—has clarified the prehistoric origins of human behavior and influenced many fields, ranging from economics to personal relationships. In SPENT, Miller applies this revolutionary science’s principles to a new domain: the sensual wonderland of marketing and status seeking that we call American consumer culture. Starting with the basic notion that the goods and services we buy unconsciously advertise our biological potential as mates and friends, Miller examines the hidden factors that dictate our choices in everything from lipstick to cars, from the magazines we read to the music we listen to. With humor and insight, Miller analyzes an array of product choices and deciphers what our decisions’ say about us, giving us access to a new way of understanding—and improving—our behaviors.

As I've been looking into buying a car over the last couple of years, I've been struck by how much car-buying is driven by sexual display urges. So, at my age, much of what I see in car design seems more annoying than cool. Even the Honda Accord (which I bought in 1988 and 1998) fits in to this pattern. The LA Times' best writer, car critic Dan Neil wrote:

I was sitting at a red light when they rolled up beside me, the guy riding his Suzuki Do-Me 8000 with his hot female companion on the back, her thongage pouring out of her low-rise jeans. Her blond hair fell from beneath the helmet and fluffed weightlessly in the hot breeze. Her skintight ballistic-armor motorcycle jacket was unzipped down to her navel. It's a good look, I guess, if you go in for that sort of thing.

As I sat there in the Amana-white 2008 Honda Accord EX-L sedan, she looked over at me. I knew what she was thinking. I knew she wanted me.

And why wouldn't she? The Honda Accord ska-reams confirmed heterosexual, and not in a Larry Craig way, either. This car ought to be issued with a complimentary pair of relaxed-fit dad jeans. Every male owner should get a free BlackBerry, which is like monogamy's ankle bracelet. To own this car is to be possessed with an inexplicable urge to trim hedges. While other cars suggest the owner is still working out issues -- experimenting, if you will -- the Accord sedan says, "Hey, I'm past all that. I'm a smoldering volcano of straight suburban love, and I accept it."

For Accord-driving women, the message is related but different: "My husband likes girls."

I finally ended up buying my friend's superbly-maintained 1998 Infiniti I30 (basically, an expensive Nissan Maxima), with 196,000 miles on it. It exudes the High Bourgeois image I'd like to hold about myself: "This man invests in quality for the long term." In contrast, the car I've actually owned for the last eleven years, my dented, paint-pealing, self-destructing 1998 Accord with 108,000 miles, broadcasts the message: "This vehicle has been owned and operated by a family of wild dingoes."

One interesting angle I've been pondering is how Stuff White People Like products, like the Toyota Prius, tend to androgynously subordinate sexual display to class display. (But I'll keep that idea for another time.)

Miller's PR continues:

In his exploration, Miller examines a wide and delightful range of familiar products and what they reveal about us, from the Sims to Rolex watches, from L’Oréal lipstick to the Hummer. SPENT illuminates:

o Why luxury car brands, such as Lexus, advertise in places such as GQ, not to inform rich potential customers that they exist, but to assure those rich potential customers that GQ readers will recognize and respect those brands when they see them
o Why kitchen appliances are now made of high-maintenance stainless steel instead of easy-to-care-for white enamel
o Why all cosmetics aim to recreate the stage at which women are at their highest level of fertility
o Why we’re such suckers for products such as Smartfood, Smartwater, Smart Start, SmartMoney, and Smart Cars—and why marketers would never use the word “intelligent” in such products
o How people advertise their traits through their car choices and iPod play lists
o Why simple IQ tests would threaten the supremacy of Ivy League universities
o Why owning a pet and actually managing to keep it alive is a good signal to a potential mate
o The real reason so many exercise machines are unused
o Why men are supposed to spend two months’ salary on engagement rings

In these economic times when it’s more important than ever to be aware of why we buy what we do, SPENT is both a fascinating look at consumer behavior that will surprise and intrigue.

About the Author:

Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist and author of The Mating Mind. He was educated at Columbia and Stanford and is an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, daughter, and many products.

For some reason, this whole topic reminded me of a refrigerator magnet I saw a couple of years ago. It had a picture of a pretty girl dancing the Hokey-Pokey at a wedding reception, and the caption read:

"What if the Hokey-Pokey is what it's all about?"

Perhaps that refrigerator magnet was my Kant-reading-Hume moment.

Speaking of things that have stuck in my memory, Geoffrey Miller's wife's name is Rosalind Arden, and I've finally figured out why that pair of names is so memorable: "Geoffrey Miller" is the most Chaucerian name imaginable ("The Miller's Tale" is perhaps the most famous of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), while "Rosalind Arden" is the most Shakespearean name imaginable. Rosalind is the heroine of Shakespeare's pastoral comedy "As You Like It," which is set in the Forest of Arden.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Occam's Butterknife strikes again

The LA Times runs a big article on a completely shocking discovery, one that's even more surprising than the fireman's test results in the Supreme Court's Ricci case. Oh, when will the never-ending surprises finally end?

Who could possibly have imagined back when the solons of California came up with the idea of having a high school exit exam that NAMs would fail it at a higher rate? And that girls would do worse at math than boys? That's just crazy talk!

But now, the unbelievable has happened:

High school exit exam hinders female and non-white students, study says

The mandatory test is keeping at least 22,500 California students a year from graduating who would otherwise fulfill all their requirements, researchers say. State education officials defend the exam.

By Mitchell Landsberg

California's high school exit exam is keeping disproportionate numbers of girls and non-whites from graduating, even when they are just as capable as white boys, according to a study released Tuesday. It also found that the exam, which became a graduation requirement in 2007, has "had no positive effect on student achievement."

The study by researchers at Stanford University and UC Davis concluded that girls and non-whites were probably failing the exit exam more often than expected because of what is known as "stereotype threat," a theory in social psychology that holds, essentially, that negative stereotypes can be self-fulfilling.

In this case, researcher Sean Reardon said, girls and students of color may be tripped up by the expectation that they cannot do as well as white boys.

Reardon said there was no other apparent reason why girls and non-whites fail the exam more often than white boys, who are their equals in other, lower-stress academic assessments.

Yup, no apparent reason whatsoever. I'm drawing a complete blank.

Reardon, an associate professor of education at Stanford, urged the state Department of Education to consider either scrapping the exit exam -- one of the reforms for which state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell has fought the hardest -- or looking at ways of intervening to help students perform optimally. Reardon said the exam is keeping as many as 22,500 students a year from graduating who would otherwise fulfill all their requirements.

Stanford has a School of Education? Who knew? Wouldn't it be fun to hear what Stanford's Electrical Engineering Department professors say in private about the quality of their colleagues in the Education Department?

"No one can be happy with these results," Reardon said. "The exit exam isn't working as it was intended."

O'Connell issued a statement containing measured praise of the report but defending the exam, saying it "plays an important role in our work to ensure that a high school diploma has meaning." Other officials in the Education Department reacted skeptically to the study, sharply rejecting its assertion that the test has no positive effect on learning.

"I'm not ready to agree with that at all," said Deb Sigman, deputy superintendent for assessment and accountability. The researchers, she said, "don't look at grades, they don't look at classroom observation or interviews with children."

But Russell Rumberger, a professor of education at UC Santa Barbara who directs the California Dropout Research Project, called the study "very sophisticated" and said policymakers need to take heed of its conclusions and perhaps consider an alternative test.

Because an alternative test will no doubt show that blacks and Hispanics are just as smart as whites. Obviously, there is some flukish flaw in this single test, just like the test in the Ricci case produced never-seen-before results.

State Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) issued a statement saying that the research "reinforces the concerns that many of us have had about the exit exam from its inception." She said the results "must make us all pause and take stock of whether the exam could be fixed or is fatally flawed."

"Fixed" is the right word for what Speaker Bass wants. Fixed like the 1919 World Series.

The exit exam, which students can take multiple times beginning in their sophomore year, includes math and English tests, with the math aligned to eighth-grade standards and English to 10th-grade standards. It has been criticized both for being too easy and for unfairly denying a diploma to students who otherwise might graduate.

The study, funded by the private, nonprofit James Irvine Foundation, is based on analysis of data from four large California school districts, those in Fresno, Long Beach, San Diego and San Francisco. Reardon said the results were very similar for all four districts, suggesting that the conclusions had broad application for all California schools.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that the exam was toughest on students in the bottom quarter of their class, based on state standardized test scores. That was also where the study found the strongest inequality of results.

"Graduation rates declined by 15 to 19 percentage points for low-achieving black, Hispanic and Asian students when the exit exam was implemented, and declined only one percentage point . . . for similar white students," the study said. Low-achieving girls had a 19 percentage-point drop in their graduation rate, compared with a decrease of 12 percentage points for boys.

Reardon said he initially was skeptical of the "stereotype threat" effect, but that it has been well-established by social psychologists and appears to apply to the test disparities.

mitchell.landsberg @latimes.com

"Protective stupidity" is still "stupidity."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 2009: Top 26 foreclosure rates all in 4 Sand States

Here we are, a couple of years into the mortgage meltdown, and foreclosures are still concentrated in the four Sand States. Normally, spikes in foreclosure rates are caused by recessions, but this is the first time in memory when a recession (or worse) was caused by foreclosures.

Foreclosure leaders focused on 4 states in new metro list

By Catherine Clifford, CNNMoney.com staff writer

The 26 cities with the highest foreclosure rate in the nation are all located in four hard-hit states, with Las Vegas topping the list, according to a report released Wednesday.

Metro areas in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona topped the foreclosure filing list for the first quarter of 2009 in a report from RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed properties. A foreclosure filing includes default papers, auction sale notices and repossessions.

Las Vegas had the highest rate of foreclosures of any city, with one in every 22 homes subject to a foreclosure filing in the first three months of the year. The rate of foreclosure filings was 4.5%, seven times the national average.

Merced, Calif., had the second highest rate, with Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., Stockton, Calif., and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif., rounding out the top five.

"The metro areas with the highest levels of foreclosure activity in the first quarter of 2009 paint a picture of concentrated problems in a relatively small number of hard-hit areas," said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac, in a written statement.

Foreclosure rates have been very high in the 4 key states throughout the bursting of the housing bubble, and so it was to be expected that cities from those states would pepper the top of the list.

However, it was a surprise to see the list so top heavy, according to Rick Sharga, senior vice president at RealtyTrac.

"The concentration of troubled metro areas within the hardest-hit states, candidly, was even more severe than we expected it to be," Sharga said. "The degree to which those four states dominated the rankings surprised even us."

The economic downturn set off by the Sand States' mortgage meltdown has spread enough that foreclosures are finally trickling down to other regions:

New problem cities: Meanwhile, some metropolitan areas had a surge in foreclosures. Boise City-Nampa, Idaho, in 27th place, Provo-Orem, Utah, in 37th, and Charleston-North Charleston, S.C., in 51st were examples Sharga gave of areas that had particular strong gains in filings.

Sharga said the rise of foreclosures in additional regions indicates new factors influencing the housing market as the recession drags on.

"What we believe we are seeing is some of the areas with unemployment problems," said Sharga. "These are people living paycheck to paycheck and, when the paycheck is gone, suddenly they can't afford to make their mortgage payments." ...

But, mostly, it's still the damn Sand States:

The national report also found that the worst of the foreclosures were centralized in a handful of worst-hit states. California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois accounted for nearly 60% of the total foreclosure activity in the first quarter, with 479,516 properties received foreclosure filings in those states.

So, if nearly 60% of the newly foreclosed homes Q1-2009 are still in the four sand states, where home prices and Loan to Value ratios were higher, then those states must account for the huge majority of the defaulted dollars.

What was it about the Sand States that set them on the path to bring down the national economy? All that sand?

Nobody seems to want to know.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer